Via The Tri-Parish Times: Flu fears prompt controls. Excerpt:
It's not hard to see how the threat of bird flu has changed the poultry farming business. In almost any poultry farm contracted with a company, there are warning signs reading: "Disease control in effect. Do not enter without authorization. Proper sanitation required for entry.''
"It's become a big deal, and they're very concerned about it around here because we're in the middle of the Mississippi Flyway (the primary north-south migration route for birds), so you have a lot of birds coming through the area, increasing the chance of bird flu being spread,'' Hico poultry farmer Scott Tyler said. "Because of that, the standards have tightened up a lot.''
Ruston poultry farmer Stan Jones said an avian flu outbreak would be extremely damaging for the area's farmers.
"If you were to have bird flu detected in one of your houses, they say you might not be able to put chickens back in it for a year,'' Jones said. "Poultry farmers can't afford that kind of hit.''
To prevent contamination and spread of the disease, poultry farmers are asked to try to stay away from other farms, and only the owner or farmer and workers from the company contracting the farm can enter chicken houses.
"The servicemen from Pilgrim's Pride will come in and put on boot sleeves and then spray underneath their trucks and inside the chicken houses to make sure they're disinfected,'' Jones said.
"We're not supposed to go to other chicken farms,'' he said. "There have been a lot of regulations added over the past couple of years to try to make sure we don't have a big outbreak.''
They're worried about H7N3, not H5N1, but the principle is the same.
